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It's been three months since I taught this book to my group of second graders and they STILL reference it during discussions of entirely unrelated books! Not only that but they bring in other books from the series and insist I look at visual motifs that have carried through from this book, the first in the series.

It's this last part that I think makes Ottoline and the Yellow Cat such a great book for teaching close reading to second graders. Not only are the pictures very detailed but much of the detail repeats cleverly throughout the book allowing the students to approach the idea of patterns and development as part of a text through the much more accessible route of pictures. Because they were picking up on visual details it was also much easier for them to explain their ideas to the other students and conversely much easier for the listening students to understand what they were saying - facilitating actual discussion between students rather than constant vying for my attention. Being able to see the details enabled them to be much more articulate about longer more extended ideas in contrast to the shorter contributions I often get when we read books that rely on the text for the story and being able to understand one another meant they were much more engaged. Details as simple as the fact that the lightbulbs above Ottoline's dinner table change each time we see the dinner table would lead to discussions about the relationship between Ottoline and Mr. Munroe with very little prompting from me.

Ottoline and the Yellow Cat is ostensibly about the mysterious disappearances of lapdogs but much of the story is, in fact, about loneliness - a difficult theme for young students to begin to explain. But the students were able to pick up on the different proportions in each of the pictures and the physical distance between the characters on each page not to mention the postcards from Ottoline's parents allowed them to begin framing their response to the story. I have to confess that I hadn't even really thought about this aspect of the story until the kids started pointing out things to me. That'll teach me to think I have anything to teach them!

All in all, a great book for ELL310. Although the pictures may make it accessible to a 210 class students will need a 310 vocabulary to be able to say everything they want to say about this book.

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Chris Riddell was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where his father was an Anglican priest and a member of the ANC. The family moved to England in 1963, when Riddell was one year old, and he spent his childhood in a number of different locations, as his father moved between parishes. Both of Riddell's parents continued to be active in the anti-apartheid movement.

Chris Riddell is an internationally acclaimed writer and illustrator whose many awards include the Nestlé Gold Award and two Kate Greenaway Medals—the most prestigious prize for illustration in the UK. He is the creator of more than one hundred books for all ages, including the immensely popular series the Edge Chronicles and his latest chapter book series, starring the irrepressible Ottoline Brown, which School Library Journal called "exceptional." Chris lives in Brighton, England, with his wife and three children where he invents his amazing characters in a very tidy shed in his yard.